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Finding Focus

This post is philosophical and a bit rambley, so bear with me. I constantly struggle with focus and motivation. Everyone tells me it’s so great you’re pursuing your passion. The accolades they give far exceed how I personally feel. I do love creating an image, I love the chase of wildlife and getting that awesome shot, I love teaching people photography. These are all gratifying to me, but the day to day grind is more difficult. Working from home, alone is hard. Getting up and getting going is not easy. It’s easier to lose myself in a book, play a video game, clean the house, organize, anything other than doing the things that actually do give me a sense of satisfaction at the end of the day. It’s like trying to hike up a huge mountain. I feel great when I’ve accomplished my goal, but those first few steps are hard to get going. It’s so much easier to take the level path back to bed, to the book or the game. Justifying I’ll get to it all later. Then I start to question whether it is all worth it? Am I really doing what I want to do? Where is the passion, the wake up and drive? You hear about these people. Do I not have the passion? Am I lazy? People seem to think it just happens, I’m not so sure. Maybe for a select few, but I think it’s a lot harder than that. Or do you need to create the passion, fake it until you make it so to speak.

So what to do? There’s the slogan, ‘Just do it’. There’s a lot to be said for that. Don’t think too hard, just go into the office and start working. But you have to have a plan, focus or else you’ll flounder and soon I’m clicking on the video game. What goal do I want to accomplish? I want to get a book published. Ok there’s a goal, but good grief, where do you start? It boggles the mind. So calm down and write out a list of steps. Make it fun, use big paper and colored markers or even crayons – they aren’t just for kids! Do a little research to flesh out the steps. Now pick a step and do it. It takes patience to get a huge goal accomplished but it’s well worth it in the end. So today I picked up my big pad of paper and jotted down my major goals. It was pretty easily actually, then wrote out some steps. The first one was writing this blog. So there you go, one thing down, now onto the next step.

I’m starting to feel a little better. Each day is a new battle or challenge – yes that’s a more positive word. So stay positive! Little steps and don’t be too hard on yourself.